Maupertuis became a member of the Academy of Sciences in Paris in 1731 and soon became the foremost French proponent of the Newtonian theory of gravitation. In 1736 he led an expedition to Lapland to measure the length of a degree along the meridian. His measurement verified the Newtonian view that the Earth is an oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at the poles). The success of his expedition gained him favour with Frederick the Great, who called him to Berlin. He became a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences in 1741 and served as its president from 1745 to 1753.

In 1744 Maupertuis enunciated the principle of least action, later published in his Essai de cosmologie (1750; “Essay on Cosmology”). It states simply that “in all the changes that take place in the universe, the sum of the products of each body multiplied by the distance it moves and by the speed with which it moves is the least [that is] possible.” The German mathematician Samuel Koenig accused Maupertuis of having plagiarized Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s work in this principle. In the ensuing controversy, Leonhard Euler came to the support of Maupertuis, but Voltaire, once his proselyte, satirized the “earth flattener” so mercilessly that Maupertuis left Berlin in 1753.

Maupertuis’ Système de la nature (1751) contained theoretical speculations on the nature of biparental heredity based on his careful study of the occurrences of polydactyly, or extra fingers, in several generations of a Berlin family. He demonstrated that polydactyly could be transmitted by either the male or female parent, and he presciently explained the trait as the result of a mutation in the “hereditary particles” possessed by them. He also calculated the mathematical probability of the trait’s future occurrence in new members of the family. In this research Maupertuis produced the first scientifically accurate record of the transmission of a dominant hereditary trait in humans.

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At first he was enchanted by his sojourn in Berlin and Potsdam, but soon difficulties arose. After a lawsuit with a moneylender, and quarrels with prominent noblemen, he started a controversy with Maupertuis (the president of Frederick’s academy of science, the Berlin Academy) on scientific matters. In a pamphlet entitled “Diatribe du docteur Akakia” (1752), he covered him with...

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